Vol. 24 No. 6 (2022)

The paper explores the peculiarities of the current system of public administration in India, the role and functions of civil servants and their interface and relations with politicians. It delienates existing main problem areas and outlines certain “remedy” actions to overcome current difficulties and raise performance of the national bureaucracy, in particular - its ability to deliver timely and better quality public services. The findings and inferences of the accomplished research are largely based on the analysis of the performance of Indian civil servants in the current administrative and political setting, specifically at the regional and local levels. The colonial legacy of civil service still persists in this fast-changing era of globalization. It is in this context that civil service reform constitutes a quintessential element of the system of good governance. The study focuses on the internationally recognized experience of the regional administration in Kerala State, focused on the successful mobilization of citizens, businesses and street level bureaucrats to withstand the impact of the pandemic. The relative success of Kerala in addressing key issues of survival for tens of thousands of citizens is largely explained by the ability of the regional and local governments to encourage and coordinate stakeholders in their joint anti-coronavirus efforts and support innovative grassroots intiatives.

Studying the evolution of public administration models and comparing different theories allows us to build a holistic and integrated management strategy. The article analyzes the evolution of public administration models: Public Administration, New Public Management, and Good Governance. These models appeared in the course of administrative reforms in many countries, and we studied the classification of their goals. Due to the increasing complexity of the system of administration, efficiency and effectiveness, as the main factor of development, become the main components of modern strategic management theories: in determining the development strategy, in the implementation of tasks of social progress, and the evaluation of public administration systems. According to a variety of researchers, effective governance contributes to determining the political and economic power of states on the world stage. In the context of dynamic development, the competitiveness of states is of particular relevance. According to experts, competition is one of the main driving forces for the development of society and the primary instrument for the efficient functioning of the public sector. In this context, it seems appropriate to apply new approaches in solving and reconsidering the issues of assessing the effectiveness of public authorities at all levels of governance, which will undoubtedly serve as an essential condition in achieving the goals set.

The article focuses on legal and ethical components of the civil servants’activities and substantiates their significance regarding the quality of work for state apparatus. The author speaks of the need to introduce the requirements for increased compliance control and independent social supervision over the conduct of public civil servants. There are different opinions among representatives of the academic society regarding the need to develop a unified code of ethics for public civil servants enshrined in the form of a normative legal act. The example of the civil service highlights the influence of legal and ethical regulations on the professional culture of civil servants. Based on modern theoretical material, the author considers situations related to conflict of interest in civil servants’ activities. The author concludes that the authorities should regulate such situations and exclude the possibility of non-compliance with the public interest in implementing administrative powers. The qualitative and effective public service depends directly on civil servants, as they represent the state itself. The civil service fulfills those government functions, which are the basis of the effectiveness for state governance. The ethical element has a significant role in the system of responsibility for public authorities and makes it distinctive compared to the obligations of other subjects of law.

Along with the growing role of the new trend of anti-globalization, the Russian Federation needs to pay particular attention to issues of digitalization and the digital transformation of the state. Despite the fact that most areas of social and economic life have already been successfully digitized, there are still gaps in public administration in terms of the legal framework. Digitalization is one of the main directions in the development of modern society. Numerous scientific works and competent opinions speak in its favor. This includes a positive impact, potential benefits for the economy, and the informatization of society as a whole. Some of the innovations have already been implemented and are being successfully applied in practice. It should be noted that digital technologies are universal, they can be used in a variety of areas. For example, they have long been included into everyday life (the introduction of electronic sick leave, employment history, etc.). Digital technologies are used to improve the efficiency of public authorities, as well as to improve the quality of work with citizens. They allow us to quickly identify the needs of the population and contribute to the achievement of more precise strategic planning and policy implementation in the development of these areas.

Strategic planning in the areas of legal support, public administration, and public service improvements provides for the new legal technologies while there are still massive failures being registered. The author raises the question of the necessity to find the reasons for such disruption not only in insufficient discipline or qualifications of public officials but also in the specific ontological peculiarities inherent in the law and legal work. In the course of the work, the author analyzed international experience, as well as relevant practice in Khabarovsk Krai in 2020- 2022. The article applies scientific methods of analysis and synthesis, induction, deduction and abduction, formalization, classification, modeling, etc. In the paper, we can see the author’s definition of an «innovative public law regime». In addition, the author outlined and explained the determinants of distrust and avoidance by private law firms (legal departments of corporations) and legal departments of public authorities to adopt, implement and apply legal innovation in current or projected legal work. The regulatory environment is adaptive in nature (although there are objectively determined limits of such adaptability). The introduction of legal innovations is primarily associated with issues of thoughtfulness, intensity and scale, as well as the effectiveness of validation. Over time, the regulatory environment becomes more complex and heterogeneous, and this trend becomes more pronounced, while having a non-linear, exponential dependence. At the same time, the impact of technology on law and legal work, which is still poorly understood and explained, gradually creates the prerequisites for future tectonic changes in the nature and ontology of law, in regulatory landscapes.

The article focuses on Russian and foreign experiences concerning the acquisition of real estate property rights by foreign citizens. Land and other real estate are of particular economic value and consequently are quite attractive for investment; this causes the increased attention of the legislators to the issue of their possible acquisition into ownership by foreign citizens. Despite the ongoing trend toward extending the national regime to foreign citizens in private legal relations, the legislative regulation is still quite heterogeneous. The available legal tools are rather diverse and include not only the definition of the procedure for acquiring property (if such transactions are allowed at all), but also some indirect measures of influence, including the establishment of specific control over the property of foreign citizens by state authorities, up to implementing their powers to expropriate such property. The strictest requirements are imposed on land, where the legal prescriptions range from a complete ban on its acquisition to the imposition of specific restrictions on land within the border zone or agricultural areas. Restrictions may manifest in establishing specific conditions for the acquisition of real estate, the introduction of permissive procedures for the relevant transactions, and the implementation of the principle of reciprocity.

This article explores computational legal analytics - its concepts, features, and ontology. The author presents the terms ‘analytics’and ‘legal analytics’. The article focuses on explaining the importance of computational legal analytics (as a segment of digital technologies brought into the professional legal activity) for professional legal activity and the legal field as a whole. The author clarifies the determinants of the need for the emergence and development of computational legal analytics and its value for the legal activities of actors (subjects). The paper presents the author’s definitions for «legal analytics» and «cognitive computing» concepts. Computational legal analytics is based on well-known, well-established, and actively used (at least already being tested) technologies. Such technologies include intellectualized legal search technologies, cognitive computing technologies, natural language computer processing technologies, machine learning technologies (including deep learning), big data processing, and machine-readable law technologies. The author specifies and explains the technologies and possibilities of machine legal analytics, realized by cognitive and other operational capabilities of computer-software complexes, including using artificial intelligence. While preparing the article, the author used research methods of analysis and synthesis, induction, deduction and abduction, classification and modeling, approximation, and formalization. Using these research methods, the author uncovered the essential descriptive characteristics of the phenomenon and concept of machine legal analytics and assessed its prospects.

The influence of regional public investment commitments, fixing the principles of interaction, support, and implementation of the investment project, positively affects the improvements of investment climate within the spatial development. The author analyzed 45 investment declarations and outlined a high differentiation of regions in fixing investment obligations, conditions, and their actual implementation concerning investors. Assuming that investors can use the declaration provisions when deciding to invest, the author interviewed representatives of regional business associations, including investors, regarding the quality of the adopted investment declarations and the obligations they need. The analysis showed that the vast majority of documents cannot be an offer and have no worth to the investor. The survey results among employees of regional development agencies and relevant executive authorities identified difficulties in preparation and implementation of investment declarations, namely: a lack of confidence in the investment declaration and insufficient interaction with business associations. Regional governments differ in their approach to the process of drafting investment documents, even though there is a unified standard for preparing investment declarations. This indicates a low awareness among regional authorities concerning what the investment process should look like. The author concludes that this is primarily due to the high informal component of the investment projects allocation and the influence of the governors and heads of the subjects of the Russian Federation on the investment climate in the region.

The article presents the intermediate results of the study under the state task «Social modeling of regional inequalities and ways to overcome them in the context of interregional and federal relations». The author focuses on the analysis of the possible impact of the management system on regional development. The main issue lies in the narrow consideration of socio-humanitarian knowledge in assessing the socio-economic development of the regions. To analyze interregional inequality, the author studied the regions located at different levels of socio-cultural modernization. The impact assessment involved two areas: the analysis of public evaluation of the management system, which is seen as a system of relations between its major subjects; the assessment of the condition of individual spheres of socio-economic activity of the regions. The study results confirmed the hypothesis about the influence of the management system on the state of regional development. The author notes that the region's belonging to a particular level of socio-cultural development affects the overall assessment of the regional management system. The lower the level of socio-cultural modernization of the region, the stronger the link with the assessment of the management system efficiency. The study allows us to draw broader generalizations and conclusions that characterize the regulation of social inequalities.

The article discusses the concept of a multi-actor perspective (hereinafter referred to as MAP), proposed by the representatives of the Dutch research institute for transitioning to sustainable development. The author compares MAP to the more widely used analytical tool MLP (Multi-Level Perspective) and highlights the characteristics of MAP. These characteristics include the analysis of different types of transition management actors (state (government), market (business), community, and the third sector) at different levels of their aggregation (sectors, organizational actors, and separate (individual and group) actors). Sectors are considered specific «institutional contexts» or «discursive fields» where organizations or individual actors interact. Sector boundaries are not fixed and are challenged periodically by actors, blurred and changed, creating competition and cooperation between various actors. The author believes that MAP should be considered as a specific type of communication model between government and society during the transition to sustainable development, as it addresses not only the problems of redistribution of power and authority between the participants during the course of transition but also allows us to understand the communication models for managing the transition to sustainable development. The value of MAP in studying the processes of managing the transition to sustainable development is that it reveals not only vertical but also horizontal communication, provides an opportunity to uncover the links of different types of power, identifies the potential of the third sector and the potential of poorly organized communities for transitioning to sustainable development.

The article presents the author's position on the meaning and importance of strategic planning in public administration. The work analyzes various definitions of strategic planning and proposes considering state strategic planning in both narrow and broad sense. The author formulated definitions of strategic planning and its manifestations - state strategic planning. The article discusses the relationship between program-targeted and project-based approaches to strategic planning and determines their advantages and disadvantages. The author pays attention to some problems in the existing legislation, where two parallel systems of regulation of strategic planning coexist: one system provided by the Law on Strategic Planning and the other by subordinate legislation. During the study, a number of other problems concerning strategic planning were identified: the absence of strategic planning documents from among those provided for in the Law on Strategic Planning; the delayed adoption of planning documents, indicating a lack of consciousness of the value of the temporary resource; insufficient level of transparency in strategic planning (numerous acts are not published); an excessive amount of programming and design documents, many of which contradict or duplicate each other, resulting in bureaucratization; violation of the unity in strategic planning, when regional and municipal strategic planning documents do not consider the goals and objectives of national development; non-compliance with municipal specifics in regional strategic planning documents. The author offers recommendations for solving the identified problems.

This article presents a new approach in the field of managerial assessment. The development and twenty years of experience in using the personality-professional diagnostics technology in the context of the resource approach, the accumulated empirical material in the field of managerial evaluation, as well as the database of over 70 thousand assessments of managers, became the basis for «adjusting» the assessment technology and determining the opportunities of a wide-scale application of the managerial preparedness models. The technology applied goes beyond the traditional normative-deficient assessment approach and expands the possibilities of making high-quality personnel decisions in the state and municipal administration system. The author, based on the explication of the results of long-term research, identifies the fundamental components of managerial preparedness of the executive, including the social component. Using the resource approach of assessment and personality-oriented management, the author substantiates the essence and reveals the content of managerial maturity as an integral characteristic of manager’s personality, opening additional opportunities for modeling and designing individualized development paths of the personal and professional development for leaders.

The article analyzes historical and socio-cultural factors of public administration by considering the Constitution of the Republic of Belarus as an instrument of scientific cognition. The authors analyzed the role of the historical concept of Belarusian statehood, its reflection on the Constitution, and its relationship to the relevant issues of state historical policy. It is noted that the Belarusian scientists’ approaches to public administration issues coincide with the trends of research studies in the post-Soviet space. The article shows that the Constitution reflects traditional values and cultural codes historically influencing the nature of public institutions and the Belarussians’ way of life. Analysis of the law «On Public Service» shows its importance for personnel policy improvement in public administration bodies. The authors describe the role of the Academy of Public Administration under the President of the Republic of Belarus in the development of public administration using a system of continuous training.

The article analyzes potential forms of interaction between public administration and entrepreneurship aimed at transitioning to an industrial-innovative model of the economy in the Republic of Tajikistan. The National Development Strategy of the Republic of Tajikistan provides three development scenarios: inertial, industrial, and industrial-innovative. Under globalization, the industrial-innovative scenario seems to be the most preferable. The author conducted a comparative legal study with models and practices of public administration in foreign countries. The article considers the Anglo-American model, the continental model, the experience of the Russian Federation in creating scientific and educational centers and identifies the prospects for adapting the model of socio-entrepreneurial corporations of the Republic of Kazakhstan. The author highlights the most promising interaction models between the state, business, and society. The article concludes that it is essential to gradually reduce the state’s role in managing socio-economic processes since the current system of government is not oriented towards the long-term socio-economic development of the country as set out in the National Development Strategy of the Republic of Tajikistan. The article argues for creating science-intensive technologies and new training system for personnel. The author proposes specific mechanisms to integrate the public administration system of the Republic of Tajikistan to the accepted standards of innovation policy organization during globalization and the country’s integration into the world economic processes.

Volunteering is one of the essential regulators in the development of Russian society. The institution of volunteerism (volunteering) attracts particular attention from the Russian government. It is reflected in the development of relevant normative legal acts (NLA), which positively affect the formation of the conceptual apparatus of volunteerism. Scholars examine individual aspects of the volunteerism phenomenon, providing a scientific methodology-based vision for the further development of normative and legal regulation. If we want to study the institution of volunteerism at the legislative level comprehensively, we need to look at the system of the country’s lawmaking. Currently, a federal law on NLAs governing the creation of normative documents is in the process of drafting. In scientific literature, there are examples of authors’ classifications of legal acts in the field of volunteerism, though they are nominal. In this regard, we should consider relevant regulatory documents following the law. The authors aim to identify and systematize the regulations governing the volunteerism sphere during the period from 1995 to 2022. The authors characterized the main concepts and identified the strengths and weaknesses in forming the conceptual apparatus of volunteerism (volunteering). We suggest to clarify the subject field of volunteerism, thereby positively affecting the development of individual regulatory documents considering the specifics and scope of government agencies, which are the basis for volunteer activities. The authors also formulated a list of recommendations for developing the institution of volunteerism in the library and information sphere.

The article addresses topical issues related to improving financial literacy in Russia through volunteer organizations. The systematic approach of the state to volunteer work includes the formulation of the mission, goals, and objectives of volunteer activities; comprehensive assessment, monitoring, and control over volunteer activities; volunteer communications; marketing analysis of the volunteer services market; motivation, training, personal development, consultation and education of volunteers. The article discusses theoretical, conceptual, organizational, and methodological issues of the formation and development of the volunteer movement in financial education using modern digital technologies. In scaling successful financial literacy initiatives and supporting, coordinating, and training financial literacy volunteers, the Financial Literacy Development Association has developed the guidelines for a multidisciplinary research study: «Volunteerism: Theory and Practice». The research findings are addressed to researchers and employees of public administration at all levels of management, engaged in volunteerism development problems, all citizens involved or wishing to participate in volunteer activities, and those who study volunteer activities.